Trailer Park on the Edge of Forever
by zombielover
Summary: The first chapter of a story based on Joe R. Lansdale's Hap & Leonard series.


There's a trailer park on the outskirts of LaBorde they call the Shitpit, on account of that's precisely what it is. The place is run down and grimy, and the kind of people who live there for any length of time are about the worst sort of scum you could imagine. That's you. Me, things I've been through, I've developed quite an imagination when it comes to the depths to which people can sink, but even by my standards the folks in the Shitpit aren't exactly pillars of society or anything close.  
  
There's a crack house that used to be next door to my friend Leonard's Uncle Chester's house, where he'd lived for a while before he finished fixing the place up and sold it off. I say used to be because Leonard burned the place down twice. Three times if you count the time I helped him. The people populated this drug den, if you want to call them people because if you ask me that is sort of stretching the definition a bit, they migrated over to the Shitpit after the third time their crack house burned down. The first two times, it got built back up in no time at all and was back to business as usual, which was sort of discouraging, but I guess the third time was the charm because there's nothing left of that house but a few scraps of charred debris and the human turds lived in it won't go anywhere near that neighborhood any more, even though Leonard doesn't live around there any more.  
  
Those crack dealers, they were scared of Leonard and with damned good reason. Or at least, that's how it used to be. You see, back when they were living in their old neighborhood, the guy who ran the show was a fella named Melton, a.k.a. Mohawk because he liked to keep his head shaved except for a thin strip down the middle. Well, I say he ran the show, but he didn't run much. I'm not sure who he answered to, though local rumor said a cut of his profits went into the pocket of LaBorde's Chief of Police. The way he and his boys and assorted crack head hangers-on seemed to be like Teflon when it came to the local law certainly lent credence to that rumor. Now Melton, he'd learned the hard way to respect Leonard, and Leonard was probably one of the few things he ever did respect in his life. There was a time that Leonard was concerned that those crack dealers might try to retaliate against him, but as long as Melton was in charge Leonard was safe, because Melton had found out  
that it wasn't smart to fuck with Leonard.  
  
Now, as I said before, after their crack house finally went away for good, this group of fine upstanding gentlemen took up residence in the Orton Trailer Park, a Shitpit by any other name, to paraphrase a well-known writer. Melton and his crew, they'd fit right in over at the Shitpit. Half of the people who lived there were already customers of theirs and the other half were desperate enough that if they could scrape together the money, they'd be regulars themselves before too long.  
  
They did so well for themselves in the `pit that they probably wondered why they never thought of moving out there sooner, if for no other reason than they were in no danger of getting burned out of house and home down there. Of course, they'd never moved down there, they'd never have met Jeb Orton.  
  
Jeb Orton's the man who owned the `pit, and the fact that he'd actually put his name on a place like that, which used to just be called the LaBorde Trailer Park before he bought it a few years ago, goes a long way to telling you what kind of man he is. I'm sort of getting ahead of myself here though. If you want to know what happened to me and Leonard on one particularly eventful weekend in July, then I'll have to begin by telling you how we got mixed up in the affairs of Jeb Orton, a story that begins with Melton's murder right out on Leonard's front porch.  
  
Now, considering their past, I don't know why the hell Melton thought he could go to Leonard for help. Maybe he'd just heard that Leonard was the kind of guy who liked to help people, or maybe in his desperation Leonard was the only person he could think of who might possibly be able to save his ass. How he even knew where Leonard lived is a mystery Melton carried to his grave. That doesn't matter though, what matters is on a humid Friday afternoon, Leonard got a knock on his front door and when he opened it, there stood Melton. I learned about all this second hand because I wasn't there, but I'll tell it to you the way Leonard told it to me.  
  
"What the fuck do you want?" Leonard had said. The fact that Melton hadn't shot him when he opened the door meant that Melton wasn't there to shoot him, so Leonard figured he could spare a few minutes of conversation with ol' Mohawk, if only to find out what might bring him to his doorstep.  
  
Melton, who Leonard told me had looked really nervous and was sweating, though that last is no surprise in the middle of summer in East Texas, had barely opened his mouth before a rusty white pickup came barreling up the street with a wild-eyed kid, probably a crack head, leaning out of the passenger window holding a machine gun. Leonard had barely had time to duck down before a stream of bullets tore up the front of his house and the back of old Melton, who pitched forward on top of Leonard in a bloody heap.  
  
Leonard called me before he called the cops, so I ended up getting out there a few minutes before they did. Leonard hadn't told me over the phone what had happened, just that I'd better get over there quick. The first thing I saw when I pulled up in front of Leonard's house was broken windows, bullet holes, blood all over the porch, and a body laying halfway inside the front door. The first thing that came to my mind was that someone had come after Leonard - me and him have made our fair share of enemies of the years, and Leonard has always had a big mouth and a tendency to open it at exactly the worst possible time - and that Leonard had managed to take the bastard out. Had he come out of it okay though? He'd sounded a bit shaky on the phone and seeing that mess in front of his house made me nervous.  
  
I heard sirens coming down the street as I stepped over the body in the doorway and headed inside. I found Leonard sitting in the kitchen spattered with blood, none of which appeared to be his own, thank goodness. I pulled a seat across the table from him.  
  
"Leonard, what in hell is going on here? Who's that piece of shit in the doorway?"  
  
"It's Melton."  
  
"Melton? You mean Mohawk? What's he doing coming around here? I know it's been a while since the last time you burned down one of his crack houses, but I thought he'd have known better than to come after you. It isn't like you ever managed to hurt his business any. I wouldn't think he had any more quarrel with you."  
  
"I don't think it was like that," Leonard said. "He wasn't the one doing the shooting. Some bastards in a white pickup did a drive by on my house but it wasn't me they were after, it was him."  
  
"Are you sure of that Leonard? Maybe he was just supposed to get you to the door and he ended up getting in the way."  
  
"I suppose that's possible Hap, but I doubt it. What I think is . . ."  
  
I didn't get to find out what Leonard thought just then, because it was at that moment that Charlie entered the room.  
  
Charlie's a friend of ours on the LaBorde Police Department. He's one of the few cops in the city who knows what he's doing. He's also one of the few who isn't as crooked as the devil's pecker. To most folks he might seem a bit comical, dressed in a green K-Mart suit looking rattier than over since the K-Mart closed down preventing from upgrading to a newer model every once in a while, shiny black plastic shoes, and the kind of hat they call a porkpie perched on his head. He'd more than earned me and Leonard's respect though. He was a good man and a good cop, better than a place like LaBorde deserved, I sometimes suspected.  
  
"Goddammit Leonard," he said as he walked into the kitchen, "What kind of shit have you gotten yourself into this time? And what are you doing here Hap? Were you here when this went down?"  
  
"No, Hap wasn't here when Melton got himself shot. I called him before I called you."  
  
"Well hell Leonard, that does my heart good to know that your first instinct, someone gets shot in front of your house, is to call over your buddies. Suggests a real high level of confidence in the local law, that does."  
  
"It's you I have confidence in," Leonard said, "The rest of the cops in LaBorde can take a flying leap for all I care."  
  
Charlie just smirked in response to that.  
  
"Now then, that's Melton out there you said?"  
  
Leonard nodded.  
  
"Why don't you tell me what happened here."  
  
That's just what Leonard did, not that there was a whole hell of a lot to tell.  
  
"So," Leonard said when he was done recounting his story, "You going to track these bastards down and run them in or what?"  
  
"I guess Leonard, but I don't see that there's much that we can do. You know as well as I do those fucking dealers never stay in jail for long no matter how often we arrest them. Relocating to that trailer park hasn't changed that any. Hell, if anything its improved their lot since they don't get any more complaints against them," Charlie said. "Or anyone setting them on fire," he added with a weary smile.  
  
"Trailer park?" Leonard asked.  
  
"Yeah, you know, the Orton Trailer Park on the edge of town?"  
  
"The Shitpit," I said.  
  
"That's the place."  
  
"I didn't know those assholes had moved down there." Leonard said. "To be honest, I haven't exactly kept abreast of their activities since the last time I burned them out."  
  
"Well I have. All evidence to the contrary it's sort of my job. Those boys have taken to the Shitpit like, well, like pigs to a shitpit."  
  
"How wonderful for them," I said. 


End file.
